Syria Just Might Be More Cooperative if Its Reactor Hadn’t Been Blown to Bits

Just “weeks after the International Atomic Energy Agency referred it [to the] U.N. Security Council,” reports George Jahn for the Associated Press, the Council plans to “discuss what to do about Syria’s refusal to cooperate with an investigation of its alleged secret nuclear activities.”

The IAEA has tried in vain since 2008 to follow up on strong evidence that a site in the Syrian desert, bombed in 2007 by Israeli warplanes, was a nearly finished reactor built with North Korea’s help. [It] expressed “serious concern” over “Syria’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA Director General’s repeated requests for access to additional information and locations.”

The Syrian government is scarcely deserving of sympathy. Just yesterday, it killed at least 14 protesters in Hama, adding more insult to injury in that city of infamy where, in 1982, President Bashir al-Assad’s father, then-President Hafez al-Assad, killed10,000 of its residents. But, whether or not Syria was seeking to develop nuclear weapons, it’s pretty cold, not to mention unrealistic, to ask a country that’s been bombed to cooperate with forces implicated in its bombing.

Of course, Syria was investigated before it was bombed, but obviously insufficiently if the West knows little about its alleged program. Not only that, but the bombing played havoc with evidence of said program.

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We sniff out issues hiding in the foreign-policy forest and haul them back to the laboratory for inspection. We examine the anterior, posterior, and underside of an issue, as well as its shadows.

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